Took My Daughters to See Wonder Woman.

It's not a great movie. I'm not sure it's even a good movie.

I'm sure the flame is coming from that statement, and I'll do my best to give reasons. I had a couple hours yesterday when there wasn't anything on the calendar, so I asked my daughters if they wanted to go see Wonder Woman. They did, of course, being the only female teens on planet earth that hadn't seen it yet, plus Dad was paying, and popcorn and drinks. What's not to like?

My elder daughter is a superhero (movie) fanatic. She's been a Captain America fan--mostly, yeah, because of Chris Evans--since the first film. She has the outfit, the shield, the whole nine yards. My younger daughter likes movies in general, and she's a Chris Pine fan, so that worked for her as well. We had high hopes for Wonder Woman, having heard rave reviews from all over the Twitter- and Facebook-sphere, mostly from women screaming that finally they had a great female lead to cheer for, but some from men as well who were impressed by the flick.

Yeah. Well.

I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum--not that it will ruin anything--but if you haven't seen the film, stop reading here.

The first half hour of the film is bad. As in straight-up bad. The acting is wooden, the dialogue is flat and lifeless, the situations are contrived. You have a brilliant warrior-woman that gets taken by surprise by a whole troop of horses that just happen to ride up to within ten feet of her while she's engaged in forbidden activity? And you expect me to take this seriously?

Fortunately, Chris Pine blunders through the non-force field that protects the island with some kind of fog, or we'd have all died from boredom. The film picks up--the grotto scene is actually quite good--and we get to what we're really doing here, except for one lovely bit as Diana leaves the island: her mother doesn't tell her a supremely critical piece of information because she's trying to protect her. That's a standard movie trope, and it's idiotic, but we let it go because we've seen it so many times I guess we're used to the rank stupidity of people on screen.

Diana's wonder at the unfolding world is excellent. Gal Godot is very good, once she gets off the island. The action scenes are pretty good, all things considered. And the film wends its way to its inevitable conclusion without ever descending to the depths of the first thirty minutes, which was nice. I should say that there is a really fine moment as well--where Diana charges from the trenches across no-man's-land. If "that's what I'm going to do" becomes the new generation's "Let It Go", it will be an upgrade, I think. Diana's refusal to stand by and see others suffer is really great, and the best part of the film.

There isn't even close to enough of it.

The poison gas thing is meh. "Gas masks won't work against it!" Lovely. If the point is to bomb LONDON with it (and I guess that's what the map lookie-loo was for in the montage of the denouement), you could use standard mustard gas, because no one there has a gas mask anyway. For reasons unknown, it doesn't affect Diana, either, unless it's because of that thing her mother didn't tell her, which surprised absolutely no one when it was (inevitably) "revealed" later on. Heck, the "peppy" gas would have been a waaaaaay better weapon than the poison gas. It turns sixty-year-old men into reasonably adequate foes for a superwoman! Why not mass manufacture THAT? Oh, because it isn't scary. Well, know what? Neither is the orange stuff. Nothing is terribly scary if you see it coming a mile off.

In fact, that's the thing about this film that bugged the most--there is not a single surprise in it. Nowhere. Every single plot twist is telegraphed from so far away it's not even a mild "huh". Turns out, Diana's mother not telling her was simply a plot device to keep us from knowing the secret, because not only is it pointless, not knowing it is potentially lethal to everyone around her and made it much harder to do the job she was going out to do. The "protection" it was supposed to confer lasted about half an hour (subjective time, less than five minutes of screen time) and was never even mentioned again, while the fact of it might have been useful when going into battle with and against mortals, who might not have risked themselves to save her if they knew she couldn't die.

I liked the multi-ethnic sidekick cohort idea. That was interesting. The characters themselves almost had depth, too, except...nah. One of the best threads was the "sharpshooter that doesn't shoot", but then he goes ahead and shoots later and we don't know why and we don't care, because it doesn't matter, because he doesn't matter. When we have the (inevitable) coupling of Steve and Diana, a whole bunch of things could have mattered, even should have mattered, but they don't. It's not a thing that even really happened. There's a whole conversation--a funny one!--about men and sex, and then there's a man and sex and we don't even allude to it. The two of them having sex should matter. And it doesn't matter.

In fact, thanks to the hopelessly contrived battle with Ares and his "only a god can kill a god" line, we realize that the entire movie is essentially pointless. Nothing has changed. No victory has been achieved. Nothing was ever even at risk. Even the heroic sacrifice of Steve Trevor is ridiculous. Yes, the gas contaminates everything for fifty miles. Too bad there isn't, I don't know, an ocean nearby, into which one could dump the contents of the plane without contaminating anything at all. I was hoping at least for something cool when Dr. Poison's mask was (inevitably) ripped off, but...nah.

I do, completely, understand the wild-eyed love for how Wonder Woman is portrayed here. She is a butt-kicking heroine of the first order, and it's about time there was one (other than Black Widow, who needs her own movie). I do sincerely wish there had been more women in the film that mattered, and yes, I caught the "Princess Buttercup turns into warrior queen" thing. She doesn't matter. Sadly. She's only there to give pathos to the beach attack, and it doesn't work, because all it shows us is that this troop of mighty warriors can be mowed down by a longboat full of average soldiers, because they have guns.

And yes, I got that the Amazons (inevitably) won the skirmish. The casualty list was high--terribly, crushingly high for an island where there are never any children. So much for creating an army that is to protect the world from war. The whole island is a lie, from start to Diana. And only Diana realizes it, and it makes no difference to anything. There's no realization that the Amazons protecting themselves has made them irrelevant, useless, pointless, that they are living lives of no purpose whatever. That might have been a message worth communicating. Instead we get an invulnerable goddess wiping out hundreds of enemy soldiers without a backward glance, until she comes up to the one woman who really, sincerely, needs to die, and then she doesn't kill her.

Perhaps that's a message of female empowerment. I wouldn't know. At least the movie passes the Bechdel test.

I will see it again, when it comes on TV. My daughters liked it--my younger daughter especially--but neither was moved by it or even what you might call inspired. It was just something we did one Tuesday afternoon. They had a lot more fun watching Hot Fuzz on the couch last night. I suspect that film will stay with them longer, too.